www.kaboom.org
is a great way to get information to help with planning and funding a new playground. If you are able to send people to their "play" workshops, they are worth it. You can also purchase (or get them with your registration at a play workshop) a complete set of manuals that provide an amazing amount of information. The manuals I have are Community Fundraising, A-Z community Assets and Resources, Community Build playspace Manual, Playspace Owner's Manual. The kit I have also includes 8 workbooks: Safety, volunteer recruitment,f ood, fundraising, logistics, children's activities, construction, and public relations. Check out their website, it's worth it!I
We just finished a fundraiser that made us a profit of $10,829. We have never raised funds that even came close to that. Not alot of work involved except for the chair person settting things up and counting all the orders and money. I was the chair person and had others help me with the orders and counting money, but they need to be people you trust. We had over $24,000 come through our hands. The fundraiser we did was selling Butter Braids. You can find out more at www.butterbraid.com
. They are simular to a danish you would buy in the store but far more superior. They have reps all over the US and you can see if there is one in your area. You sell each braid for $9 and you make $4. Our goal was 1800 braids sold for a profit of $7,200.
We doubled that and sold over 2600. We are a very small midwest town with only 600 students in Pre-K - 5th grade. Only 45% of the students participated in this fundraiser. We also took our goal of 1800 braids and divided it by the 600 students and decided to offer a drawing to all the students that sold 3 or more Butter Braids. We knew that some would sell more and some students would not sell any at all. We were also able to have all the classes & teachers sample the Butter Braids and that got the kids excited about selling them. I would highly recommend this fundraiser to any parents group. It was so successful that we will be doing it again next spring to have delivery before Easter.
Good luck!
Lowe's is nice - but there is a program through Home Depot and Kaboom www.kaboom.org
that funds play structures and works directly with the different manufacturer's. We also did a "gift brick" idea where familes and local businesses could donate a brick with printed info on it. (That was $9K in profit.)
When building a playground, remember that there are city park and rec departments. Many of them rely on our spaces in the summer months or for after school programs. They need the play structures just as much as we do. We were able to talk ours into going in for 1/2 on our structure and the school district paid for the installation and site prep.
The easy thing about a playground is that it is something that everyone can relate to. Just don't wait too long to get it put in or the families of older kids start to question the value of the effort.
My friend is working with a brandnew fundraising program selling CHristmas trees and holiday decals. Hers is a brandnew co and The return is great ($10-$15 a tree) and involves only one day of work- when the trees are dropped off and distributed. The whole program basically runs itself! She said you can contact her at: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more info. Also, I imagine you could also raise funds by arranging for a tree drop off program - $10 a tree sounds fair to me - I'd pay that if it would save me some time at that time of year. Good luck! We are going to try the program out this year at our church!
I'll echo some comments. The Lowe's Grant is amazing (THANKS LOWE's & PTOtoday!)...
With BoxTop$ we tried something new this year. We had a February Family Social event with a D.J., bake sale, games, prizes and free raffles. Every child that came in received one raffle ticket. But we also promoted a month or so before that for every two extra BoxTop$ they brought they would receive an extra raffle ticket. We raffled off a bunch of different things from spirit wear to five WebKins, which were such an amazing hit with the kids (it's the big thing right now). We received over 1000 BoxTop$ that night, which is only $100, but if you incorporate this into 3 or 4 events over the year and couple it with monthly incentives it can really pay off.
Also we ran a YankeeCandle fndraiser this Spring and raised over $6000 profit. This is great because they separate the orders for us, unlike some of the other fundraisers we have run. We will likely run this twice next year, including in late Novemeber/early December, which I would expect with the holidays would lead to even more profit.
We had a couple of new things happen this year that required extra funds. One was our school's acceptance to the National Computing Conference. We needed about $4000 for the families to attend so we ran a "Change for the Future" drive, using donated water bottles to collect the change and awards ice cream parties to any class that raised over $50 (every class did!). We also had a laptop computer cart that the Principal wanted to make happen so we are running a Golf Tournament next weekend. This has already raised $5000 with hole sponsors and the sign-ups, and we expect to have over $9000 after the raffles and such.
